TIME TO CHILL

WHAT’S the closest he’s ever come to death? It’s a tricky question for a full-time “extremophile” like Wim Hof – so many choices! We’ve been here chatting in his kitchen in the wet north of the Netherlands all morning, and I’ve already counted 12 showstopping occasions that I wouldn’t have survived.

There’s the time he stood in a plexiglass box filled with ice for 112 minutes, and the time his cornea froze over while he was swimming under a sheet of ice in a lake near the Arctic Circle and he lost consciousness just as he was hauled out by his ankle by a rescue diver (all of which have contributed to his nickname, the Iceman).

He’s dangled by one finger from a rope suspended between two hot air balloons at 1,6km above ground (“With no shirt on”) and been lost in a whiteout running on Everest – “I was past the ‘death zone’, in nothing but my shorts.”

I should probably add here that pretty much all Wim’s stories begin with him taking off his clothes and end with him seconds from death.

So he is thinking. What’s the closest? When I arrived, I’d been relieved that he was wearing a T-shirt and was not bare chested as he often is. But now he’s lifting his shirt to show me a massive scar, an indentation the size of a fist, where a hole was cut at the site of his intestines.

And then he